


And That's All

by Tenacious_Minds



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Harry Potter also needs a big hug., Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Remus Lupin Needs a Hug, Remus Lupin Raises Harry Potter, discussion of child abuse, no beta we die like men, tags will be added as they apply
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 17:06:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29969565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tenacious_Minds/pseuds/Tenacious_Minds
Summary: Remus' routine falls apart
Relationships: Remus Lupin & Harry Potter, Remus Lupin & Minerva McGonagall, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 7
Kudos: 28





	And That's All

**Author's Note:**

> So, I don't generally like posting fics that aren't finished, but this has been sitting on my hard drive for weeks and it's Remus' birthday. This is the first chapter of a longer unfinished work and remains mostly unedited.

The big things, the life-changing moments, the single split second in which your entire world view rends, tears; those moments. 

The thing about them is that they happen on the normal days, the banalest of weeks; the toneless monotony of months gone by. 

He has a routine is the thing. He’s always had one. Routines are important to him, they help him organize his thoughts and straighten out the incomprehensible shifting of the world around him. He had a routine as a child, inherited from his mother, and as a teenager, as much as a teenager in the depths of war _can_ have. As much as a young adult— just barely twenty-one— can have when he’s lost everything. He’s always had a routine, but the one he has now, he thinks, in the throughs of rejected magic and broken hearts is the only thing holding his soul together. The bland sameness of it lets him drift away from his body and pretend, for the most part, that he is normal. 

He gets a muggle job. 

When the act of living stops feeling like the weight of the world. When he gets back from middle-of-nowhere Wales with news of the finished war. Back from where no one bothered to send for him and finds wizards celebrating in the street. Back from finding out from a _newspaper_ that every person he has loved is dead or as good as. 

Back from the depths of hell, he finds himself in afterwards. As everyone around celebrates the death of his family. 

When he gets back from there, he has the teaching certification he got in the years before the war-torn Wizarding world stopped functioning, between his seventeenth and twentieth year, just before Dumbledore decided that actually, he might be useful after all. In the years during which the Ministry had bigger things to worry about than double-checking his credentials. 

He’s meant to be teaching young pre-Hogwarts Wizarding children but it’s too easy for people to guess what he is when he’s sick and torn up once a month. But the curriculum isn’t so different, and he’s spent his whole life reading muggle paperbacks and making notations in the margins and Minnie, the _only_ one who had reached out, after everything, had helped him get his paperwork in order. Minnie told him that he could, and for lack of a better idea, he did.

So, he works in a muggle school. He’s still ill once a month of course, but the lower-income school system is desperate for half-decent teachers, and even though he misses one or two classes a month, he’s _good_ at it. He’s pretty sure the Headmistress hates him, just a little bit, for all of the sick pay, but he came with the highest of praise from one Minerva Mcgnagall, deputy headmistress to one of the most prestigious private schools in the United Kingdom and _oh, haven't you heard of it?_ He came with tutoring experience and a joyous smile and a note of disability from a government that technically doesn’t exist and what was she going to do when the position had been empty for over half a year. Falsified paperwork feels wrong, somehow, but he doesn’t have it in himself to really feel guilty about the whole thing when his students love him and his classes always have the highest grades. He doesn’t feel guilty because he knows, with a bone-deep kind of ache, that really, many of these students have told him he’s the only reason they still even bother to show up. He loves them all with a burning passion he had promised himself he never would again. 

So he does his job, and he stays at his desk and eats his lunch in his classroom, door ajar, always, and he lives a life that he barely remembers day today because otherwise, he might not be able to keep himself together for it. He works at the low-income Surrey school where half the students are brown and the other half barely get breakfasts, and the students who do are the ones whose parent are loath of their existence, who slouch through school with barely a glance up from scuffed shoes and grunted swear words; the ones who hate school with a passion. He went to school in small-town Wales but small-town schools with almost no funding and three towns' worth of students is almost as bad. There’s something achingly familiar about the way the students drag their feet through the hallways, even if the accents are different and even if sometimes they look at him weird because he says things the same way Sirius would have with his posh London accent— all French inflection nearly beaten out of him, except when he was too tired to do anything but slur his words, curled up in Remus’ bed, up late talking about their shared nightmares. Where they— 

That’s the thing though isn’t it, his routine. 

He had his flat, old and draft, always just a little cold and damp and musty, always two sweaters and socks and two pairs of sweat pants because the heat only works half the time. Always one bad storm away from being condemned. But there's a ginormous Tesco down the block, the kind with the high tech fluorescent lights and the humming refrigerators that always kind of give him a headache if he spends too long roaming the isles and that pervasive chill that always haunts big chain groceries and then there's the little health food corner store with the expensive cheese and even more expensive wine and wall to wall glass windows and exposed wooden beams that went up just last year as the gentrification creeps ever closer. The ones he’s always a little afraid to look at too closely, for fear he might be robbed blind. One of the municipal housing residents the suburban moms complain will ruin the neighbourhood that they really have no business being in in the first place and, well. The Tesco is always full to bursting and roaming with all the people who give him suspicious side eyes for his tatty old blazer and ancient scuffed oxfords and scared face. Needless to say, he tries to avoid all that. He doesn’t need the extra stress of trying to look presentable for judgy middle age moms with perfectly coiffed hair and two-point-five screaming children, even if it is more convenient. He does his shopping for the week at the small family-owned grocers three blocks away and even farther from the school where they know him by name and sometimes if he’s looking particularly peaky after a full moon, might foist a free samosa on him, even when he insists he doesn’t need it (he’s long since stopped insisting.) 

The thing is. Today, exactly two days post full moon where he’d torn up his stomach badly enough to need a trip to St. Mungo’s, two days post where he feels a little like a dead man walking an _all_ he wants to do is collapse with a hot cup of tea and a bowl of chicken soup, he does not have the energy or the will to pay 20 quid just to go to the store where he might get a free samosa and a gentle pat on the hand, as lovely as that sounds. The Tesco is _right there_ and they have those pre-made soups and cheap tea and he can do his actual shopping tomorrow, even though that means he’ll have to go hungry at lunch tomorrow. He doesn’t even care, as long as he can be in his bed in the next twenty minutes. 

Later, much later, he’ll know that this is the best thing that could have happened to him, but at the moment, he only knows dread. 

Everything happens in under five minutes. He is browsing the soup options, chicken noodle, tomato, chilli, something that vaguely resembles vomit but is labelled chowder when a small child tugs on his sleeve. 

He is sunburnt and he’s squinting at Remus and Remus wonders if maybe he needs glasses before he really registers what he’s seeing. The child… He looks remarkably like… he doesn’t even want to think about. The probability is far too low and he doesn’t think he has the mental stability to even consider the possibility. 

“Hi!” The child says. His voice is steady and he appears unbothered. Remus looks around for a parent and sees no one even close enough to call out to. 

He kneels down. It’s a big supermarket, perhaps he’s lost his mum. 

Up close he can see the fading bruise partially obscured by the view from his long wild hair and can see the remnants of a peeling sunburn on his nose, even under the dark brown of his skin, his cheeks look painfully red. 

“Hey there,” he says, gently, mind starting to race. He doesn’t know what to do. He’s never really been great with kids under the age of six and this boy looks like he can barely be more than four. He’s a grown man who a random child of colour has approached in a grocery store. 

“My auntie left me here and the teachers at school always say if you’re ever alone to find someone you know or someone who looks safe.”

He blinks. The kid doesn’t _sound_ four, but he’s tiny, bony shoulders poking through the overlarge fraying t-shirt. And— “She _left_ you here?” He doesn’t even know what to say about him being _safe_. He’s probably the least safe person in the store. 

The boy shrugs. “Yeah. It happens sometimes. She’ll be back.” 

Remus is so _so_ out of his depth. Just, incredibly lost. His exhaustion has all but evaporated.

He stands, a little shakily, and holds out his hand. 

“Alright, then. Why don’t we find an employee and see about getting your aunt back here then.” Really, he’s considering calling the police. Leaving a child in a grocery store? But, he supposes, perhaps he wandered away and she simply forgot. It does happen, he knows that. He’s trying desperately to rationalize this in his head. Only, the boy had seemed so _calm_. Like this happens all the time. 

The boy nods and takes his hand, all too unbothered, and follows Remus to the back of the store where a bored-looking customer service representative stands, leaning against the counter. 

She doesn’t look at them for more than a second before she says, “no bathrooms, sorry.” And turns back to the magazine she’s flipping through. 

“Ah. No, rather. That’s not.” He pauses when she shoves the magazine out of the way and moves towards to register. “No returns, either.”

“No. I seem to have found a lost child. He says his aunt left him here by accident?” 

The girl's face immediately softens when she leans forward to peer over the counter. 

“Ah, poor dear. Why don’t we see what we can do about gettin her back here then huh?”

The boy nods, smiling at her and lifts his arms like he’s asking to be picked up. 

Remus is just really out of his depth here. Without thinking about it too much, he scoops the kid up under the armpits, and deposits him on the counter, where he proceeds to swing his legs, trainer heals bumping up against the counter. 

The girl leans forward to talk to him, and Remus looks away, leaning against the counter for only a moment before the child says, “Oh!” And pops of the counter with no care for the height. Remus gasps, trying to catch him before he falls, but the boy lands on his feet, light as air, and says, “Auntie!” A harried-looking woman, too thin and too tall, comes rushing down the aisle, looking irate. She looks… oddly familiar. Something about the shape of her face, the slant of her eyes and the watered-down green of them, like dying grass. 

“Boy! What have I _told_ you about wandering away?” She glares at Remus and yanks the boy away roughly. The boy frowns, and pulls his arms away, and turns back towards the counter. 

“Bye Lila!” He says, waving, and Remus frowns. And then, without warning, he throws his arms around Remus’ waist, squeezing tightly, to a horrified gasp of the woman with the long neck and then prances away. The woman looks horrified. “Come _away_ from him what have I told you about interacting with people like _that_.” The boy follows her, frowning. 

Remus can just hear him say it, halfway down the aisle as he’s dragging away. There are old finger-ringed bruises around the wrist the woman is holding far too tight. 

“That’s not _people_ auntie. That’s uncle Moony!” 


End file.
